


Motion Of The Ocean

by sudapigrafool



Category: 30 Seconds to Mars, Shannon Leto Antoine Becks
Genre: M/M, Unrequited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-18
Updated: 2014-04-29
Packaged: 2018-01-19 21:24:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1484590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sudapigrafool/pseuds/sudapigrafool
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: (unrequited) Antoine/Shannon<br/>Set in Los Angeles; 30STM is on a break. Jared's away in Paris, and yet still manages to be very present. (2011 orig.)<br/>In response to the prompt: "I hear you cry at night. Do you dream about them? I know that’s why you wreck things, and push me." – Lilo, Lilo and Stitch</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

As long as there was a beach, it seemed like everything was easy between them. Miami, Los Angeles, sunrise to sunset Shannon was chill. Tulum, Mexico; a little sand, a little surf and Shan was a happy guy.  
  
Antoine should have realized nothing’s ever that simple.  
  
Maybe he’d misinterpreted the invitation to stay at the house with Shannon while Jared was in Paris. He’d arrived on the doorstep with a single overnight bag, packing light, but heavy with anticipation only to discover he had a room of his own and his own bed. The living room had the stark uninhabited feel of a home put up for sale thanks to Shannon’s lack of use. Everywhere Antoine looked there was a distinct absence of the kind of clutter you might associate with comfortable use and living. And now, days later, their combined presence still hadn’t left much of a mark. Even the kitchen was starting to look dusty thanks to their habit of eating most meals out and on the fly. They took turns making the morning coffee, and left the pool covered. Downstairs, a maze of their equipment was spread out over every available surface--couches, counters, even the cautiously protected felt of one very special custom pool table--while Jared’s precious studio remained inviolate and sacrosanct behind its sealed door. The red eye of the electronic security sentry blinked at them dolefully through every rehearsal. Wordlessly, Antoine had watched Shannon shuffling around stiffly under its unfaltering glare, missing beats and losing his place in the rhythm like it had put some kind of hex on him.  
  
They had plenty of work to do, but Shannon was finding it hard to get down to it. There were distractions. Business meetings he couldn’t put off and phone calls he didn’t even try to. He never failed to check his messages either. Almost _obsessively_. The couple of times they did manage to find the time practice together for their upcoming show, something about Shannon... actually, nearly everything about Shannon, had seemed strangely "off tempo" in a way that made Antoine feel edgy and was hard to describe.  
  
On the surface he was business as usual. The obvious problem seemed to be he was spreading himself kind of thin. Shannon was keeping in contact with Thirty Seconds to Mar’s crew, and overseeing the logistics for the next leg of their tour. Although Tomo'd had some down time coming, he was managing to stay in touch. Jared, however, was at Fashion Week in Paris, and seemed a little harder to reach whenever Shannon needed a yes or a no. Once the last of the packing crates had finally returned safely from Hawaii, all the band’s equipment and stage sets had needed to be carefully checked, inspected, and tested. Later, everything would be packed up again and made ready to send on its way to Mexico City. Meanwhile, in between time consuming chores, Shannon was trying to sandwich in some planning for their DJ-ing gig at the Playhouse, plus a little relaxation for himself. One afternoon, he got the Ducati out of storage and headed out to Venice Beach. Antoine knew, because while Shannon was there, he’d posted a picture on his twitter.  
  
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have had a clue, because Shannon hadn’t said a word to him before taking off under the unusual threat of an overcast Los Angeles sky. All day, since long before lunch, Shannon had been sullen and mute, stalking through the house and staring out windows like a caged animal, and then suddenly he was gone. Not that Shannon had to clear his comings and goings with his houseguest, or anything, but it left Antoine feeling a little alone and bewildered not knowing when to think he might be coming back.  
  
It was also on twitter that Antoine discovered links to about a half a dozen pictures of Jared with Terry in Paris. And then at least a half a dozen more. Jared and Olivier, Jared in his body revealing, open-sided sleeveless tees. Jared wearing an Yves Saint Laurent fishnet tank top indulging the paparazzi. Jared in funny poses making silly faces. There were lots of others, too. Jared looking slightly more reserved standing beside celebrated fashion designers, and bunches of people Antoine barely recognized outside the pages of tabloids and glossy magazines. People he didn’t know and probably never would. Jared huddled together with exotic and beautiful people in highly exclusive locations. Jared, unsubtly turning his alluring expression toward the cameras…  
  
Jared, the occasionally unresponsive and practically unreachable Leto brother, looking utterly ageless and nearly untouchable for any mere mortal whose name wasn’t also a famous brand.  
  
And Shannon, standing by himself on the beach, taking pictures of high tide and a stormy, turbulent sea.  
  
It had taken Antoine until now to notice the tug of the undercurrent just beneath the surface. Alone in the home Shannon normally shared with his brother, he waited silently and watched by the window for his friend’s return, while outside the westerly wind kicked up just like it always did before an advancing rain.  
  
-TBC


	2. Chapter 2

It was the first serious professional argument they’d had and Antoine hardly knew what to think about it. Right away at breakfast he knew Shannon was tense when he’d stomped into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee, then stalked off downstairs without a word.  
  
At the bottom of the stairs, though, he must have realized he was alone and no telltale footsteps were following him. "Are you coming?" Shannon hollered up through the open stairwell in a gruff baritone Antoine had never heard him use before.  
  
"Sure," he called back, shoving himself away from the counter and depositing his dishes in the sink.  
  
They were practicing again, finally, after a few days of Shannon spending most of his time chasing down contract details over new concert dates the band had added to their schedule. Plus settling a ‘labor dispute’ between two of Thirty Seconds to Mars’ techs. He’d also sacrificed half a day to interviewing applicants, attempting to fill a vacant position on the band’s production team. But now he and Antoine were rehearsing again and about time too, in Antoine’s opinion, because their Playhouse gig was tomorrow night.  
  
From somewhere down below came the sound of chair legs squealing across the floor and the thump and thud of rough handling. Then a coarsely muttered, "Fuck!" Shannon was already swearing under his breath before Antoine’s foot had even hit the bottom stair. Uh-oh.  
  
"What?" Well, sure, Antoine had been messing around on his own a lot, anytime he was left at the house by himself for hours and hours on end, but usually he was pretty careful to put things back the way he’d found them.  
  
"Nothing," came the terse reply. A spare set of sticks and an empty tom stand careened toward an empty corner.  
  
"Jesus, Shannon… " Antoine laughed tentatively, but the older man cut him off.  
  
"You got something you want to show me?" he challenged, gesturing to the deck. "Then let’s hear it."  
  
So, he played him some brand new mixes, stuff they’d never tried in front of an audience before. The sounds that surrounded them were still rough and raw with a lot of cold technological pulsing, the kind of stuff it was Shannon's job to warm up with his unique organic blend of sticks and skins and his own body heat.  
  
Only, that morning, Shannon’s playing had been more like a dangerous seismic event than actual drumming. He’d gone at it stone-faced with aggression for most of an hour while beads of sweat gathered on his brow and upper arms.  
  
"It’s not ready," he announced finally, while toweling off his face and hands. "We’ll go with what we’ve already got."  
  
At first Antoine had hesitated. What, no discussion? And that was that? Irritably, he wondered if, after all this time waiting for Shannon’s opinion, there was anything he was going to get to say about it. At all. He started to argue for trying out at least something new, audiences always liked something experimental, but before he could finish Shannon was informing him sparely that everything they had would be new to an L.A. audience anyway. End, apparently, of discussion.  
  
And that, Antoine later realized, was when it happened. For days his frustrating had been mounting, and his temper over being ignored had been at war with his empathy for Shannon’s situation. "Look," he’d started again, sort of insistantly -- kind of _forcefully_ , really -- "maybe you’re forgetting just how long I’ve been DJing in clubs, but…" and he’d barely managed to say something about his years of experience with club audiences when Shannon's barking laughter interrupted him.

There was something angry and ugly about the twist of Shannon's lips as he dismissively informed Antoine he’d been hanging at clubs and working music crowds in cities Antoine had never even been to since long before Antoine was old enough to get past a doorman. With or without a fake ID. And somehow right at that precise moment, the fact that it wasn’t _his_ fault Shannon hadn’t made himself more available to practice, so the songs _would have been_ ready in time for tomorrow night's gig all came tumbling out of Antoine’s mouth in an angry rush.  
  
Instantly, he was aware of the huge error in judgment he’d just committed. It also occurred to him, more or less simultaneously, it was already too late to take it back.  
  
Shannon couldn’t even look at him. His jaw was clenched and his nostrils pinched white above the tight set of his mouth. "I don’t need you to question my decisions. I only need you here to do your fucking job." He’d paced briefly right, then left like a caged tiger. And then he’d huffed out a breath and headed for the stairs.  
  
"Shannon!"  
  
Antoine’s anxious call was answered solely by the noise of Shannon banging and slamming his way through the house on his way to the garage door. A moment later, the angry but surely satisfying growl of the Ducati roared out of the driveway and he was gone again.

　

\- TBC


	3. Chapter 3

Antoine checked his phone again after forcing himself to wait the entire fifteen minutes this time, each passing hour being halved and quartered at this point by his restless anxiety.

There were still only the two messages from his cousin Matt that he figured could wait a little longer. This thing with Shannon felt like it couldn’t, although it was looking more and more like it would have to.

Shannon wasn’t answering his calls. He wasn’t responding to Antoine’s texts either. Sunset had happened two hours ago, and Shannon had been gone for almost the whole day. He wasn’t randomly tweeting like he sometimes did, Antoine knew, because he’d been checking that, too. As fundamentally capable a person as Shannon was, Antoine had begun to worry that maybe he’d wrecked his bike, or simply run out of gas some place between home and wherever-the-fuck. Out of distraction, or an excess of irritation, or simply the perverse desire to get lost somewhere for a while and smash the current status quo to pieces. Shannon could be like that sometimes. Not intentionally, exactly, but maybe this time he’d been pushed a little too far.

Calm down, he’d told himself. Repeatedly. No use getting crazy. But, that was before he’d burnt the hastily prepared dinner he’d been trying to hold and keep warm.

He thought about calling Jared. Actually, he’d thought about it a lot. Calling him, tweeting him, texting him, hailing him, running up the fucking red flag and raiding Shannon’s laptop for his private email address... No, no better not. Holler for Emma, bug Tomo on his vacation… No, not that either; he didn’t dare. Because whenever Shannon finally did decide to come back, he’d probably want to kill him for it, and Antoine didn’t think he’d be able to deal with the kind of scene that would be. The thought alone was enough to make something sore and vulnerable twist in his gut.

Never before had Antoine felt the eleven year age difference that separated them more acutely. Strange, too, because most of the time their relative ages meant nothing. It was Shannon’s extra years of experience with the music industry, if anything, that gave his word greater weight in their relationship. Yet somehow, maybe without even meaning to, Shannon had managed to find Antoine’s "little brother" button and had pressed it with an expert's skill. Ever since their argument that morning, guilt and misguided loyalty had been pulsing through Antoine’s blood stream with an authority better than equal to the effects of his nervous adrenaline. It had kept him sitting on his hands all day waiting and doing nothing, and it was stopping him from making that call to Jared now, when really this had gone on long enough. Probably too long if Shannon was in trouble, or lying in a ditch somewhere. Somebody had to do something.

And he was just about to, had already talked himself into doing it, when suddenly he heard a familiar rumbling sound. Muted by distance and the deadening effect of passing through insulated walls, masked by the ambient whisper of eco-friendly air-conditioning, he still heard it. It was getting closer... louder and even closer now, close enough to be in the driveway. The soft strobe of a single headlamp arced across the living room window. Miraculously, the muffled noise of the garage door shuddered up, then down, and a moment later came the metallic opening thunk of the steel door connected to the house. There stood Shannon. Frowning, tired, helmet tucked under his arm and wearing a thin coat of road grime, but all in one piece.

"Thank God," Antoine said quietly, raising an eyebrow at him, trying to appear matter-of-fact in spite of the hammering relief in his chest.

"Yeah, hey," Shannon replied wearily. His gaze wandered across the floor, not able to connect with Antoine’s eyes. "Listen," he said, all business, barely pausing to close the door behind himself. "There’s something I have to say." He shifted his stance and scuffed a dust covered boot against the floor. "It wasn’t your fault, this morning. I’m sorry. That wasn’t about you."

"It’s okay," Antoine mumbled. Eloquent, he chided himself, not at all what he’d been planning on saying. He’d had lots of time to plan. But now that Shannon was here, standing in front of him, his throat was too tight for anything more.

Shannon shook his head and made his way across the room to set down his helmet and gloves. "No, it’s not," he continued, grasping for words. "It’s just, I’ve been working really hard, and letting some things get to me." He still hadn’t looked up, or made eye contact. "I know it’s no excuse, but… that’s what happened. And, I’m sorry."

With each word he spoke, the lump in Antoine’s throat seemed to grow larger, along with the ache in his chest. "Well," he answered slowly, "I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure, and been having trouble sleeping…" _I know you’re up at night. I've heard your waking cry in the dark, and the smothered noises coming from your room._

"Yeah, well," Shannon hesitated. "I get busy and, uh… kinda cranked up during the day…"

_And then last night, I heard your footsteps in the hall. Coming closer, I dared to imagine. But they slipped passed my door, dashing a brief hope …_

"…it makes it hard to fall asleep sometimes."

_I followed you silently through the darkness, creeping down the stairs…_

Antoine nodded. "Hey, we’ve all been there." _I saw the ghostly glow of light bleed out beyond the studio door._

"Hope I didn’t wake you."

"No, no…" he whispered.

_I heard the songs you played, and the recorded conversations. I recognized those soft digital voices. I heard the sounds you were trying not to make._

"Well, look," Shannon sighed, half yawning. "I’m pretty exhausted. I’m just gonna go…" He pointed his thumb in the direction of the back part of the house and towards his room.

"Yeah, sure," Antoine voice cracked hoarsely and he ducked his head quickly, coughing behind his fist.

"We can pick it up tomorrow? Get a set list and everything worked out before the show."

"Sounds good." Antoine murmured. He was bobbing his head up and down blindly. He heard the quiet jingle of the metal buckle on Shannon’s jacket fade with the sound of his footfalls as he moved down the hall. Antoine never looked up, didn’t actually see him go. His eyes were too full and in danger of spilling over. What he saw was a blur of gray, like a storm at sea. His eyes were as full as an ocean.

-TBC


	4. Chapter 4

Truthfully, the onstage part had always been what was best about them, and the one time their partnership felt most complete. But Antoine knew even when it was as good as it could get, it would never be enough to fill up the voids in Shannon’s soul. For as long as they’d been working together, he still didn’t think he’d ever understand exactly what did.

Although by now, he did know who.

He’d made up his mind to deliberately work on forgetting about those things, though, while they still had a performance to give and a night to get through together. There were emotions he needed to set aside and thoughts he’d have to put out of his mind so he could stay focused.

Which, oddly enough, required a lot less discipline than he’d imagined it would when, first thing the following morning, Shannon had brought coffee to his bedside exactly the way he liked it and lit the room up with his smile. Contrition suited him, Antoine observed slyly.

But then, he quickly realized, it would be much too easy to deceive himself. To give in to the seemingly harmless fantasy that this could still work out for them, a self-indulgent ruse that Antoine suspected wouldn’t last long before it broke his heart again.

And sure enough, as things turned out, it was not contrition behind Shannon's sudden change of disposition. Not at all. It was Jared. He was on his way home, he’d be back in LA by tomorrow, bringing the sun with him.

Regardless, the gig at the Playhouse had gone like clockwork and felt strangely like normal. They'd been a great success. Whatever Antoine had been expecting, or dreading, whatever indelible changes he’d feared his relationship with Shannon had been through, mercifully it had left their stage presence unscathed. Though in some subtle ways, things that probably no one else even noticed, all night it had seemed to Antoine that Shannon’s performance had been a trifle rushed and somewhat distracted. He'd been anxious and anticipating, and ever-so-slightly ahead of the beat. Almost as if he was trying to push the tempo of his entire universe forward in time, stroke by stroke, out of a need to bring tomorrow just a little bit closer, a little bit faster.

Declining an invitation to party afterwards, they headed directly home after the show. It was Shannon’s choice, really, he was driving. Antoine tried not to dwell on it as a last, lost opportunity. Neon signs and store fronts along Hollywood Boulevard slipped passed them in the dark. The boulevard of broken dreams, wasn't that what people called it? They turned the corner at Vine St., by Katsuya, then went north passed The Avalon and on towards the freeway, the intermittent glow of streetlights marking their passage. Antoine kept his own counsel when their ride back in the car turned into an animated monologue on the need to go grocery shopping and restock the refrigerator. For Jared. Who had strict standards.

"I don’t know if I should get almond milk or soy. He usually wants the organic soy, but they don’t always stock it," Shannon fretted.

Sitting mutely in the checkered light of the passenger seat, Antoine tried to recall what it was exactly they said about silence "speaking volumes," feeling equally relieved and devastated that Shannon was too preoccupied to hear anything other than his own words. The rush of south bound headlights slid anonymously across the windshield like eyes that looked over him without seeing. Their entire week together had come down to this one moment of mixed success and regrets. If they’d had anything at all left to say to each other, it had been swept out with the tide of Jared’s imminent arrival.

When they got to the house, though, Shannon suddenly seemed to remember his companion and his manners. As euphoric as he was exhausted, he bid Antoine a cheerful, weary good night and "catch you in the morning," then surprised him with an affectionate bear hug before heading off to the shower. After which, he went straight to bed and slept without waking. At least, as far as Antoine--who did not sleep--could tell.

It was still dark when Antoine decided to get up and start packing. He hadn’t brought much with him, which was kind of a blessing now. There wasn’t much to do. Standing in the modest guest bathroom, he glanced up at his own reflection in the vanity mirror; sleepless eyes, stark shadows, jaw and cheeks still nearly smooth from the night before. Not that he’d intended to shave again this morning, there was no time to waste on such things. Silently, he gathered up his toothbrush and few other possessions, thinking how awkwardly they’d lain across the counter, never finding a proper place for themselves or looking very much at home. Dawn’s first amber light was peering in through the tiny, east-facing window. Shannon, he knew, would be awake with the daylight. This was one goodbye he didn’t think he could face, it was time for him to go.

His own apartment was on the other side of town. Now, before rush hour, the traffic would be light. He tossed his only bag into the backseat of his jeep and thought about just driving around for a while before going back to his place. Silent and empty, he figured it would be better if he got there without bringing along all the demons in his head.

Where to go, though? He’d always been such a city boy he didn’t dream much about wide open spaces. Had never felt cramped in a studio before, or restricted by the dark. But. Lately more than a few things about that had changed.

As he climbed behind the wheel and started up the engine, there was one spot it occurred to him he might head out to. Somewhere he could see the sunrise and breathe the free salt air. One place where, no matter what, the world never seemed to fall out of rhythm; somewhere he could stand on life’s ever shifting sand, and try to clear his head.

-end


End file.
